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Cassidy on McCormack on Barth: Election and Trinity

The latest issue of The Westminster Theological Journal includes a piece by James J. Cassidy entitled ‘Election and Trinity’ in which he offers a ‘non-Barthian’ critique of Bruce McCormack’s reading of Barth’s ‘second’ doctrine of election. It’s a predictable argument: ‘… what McCormack has done is conflate the very Creator-creature distinction that he claims to maintain. Or, rather, he has collapsed the creature into the Creator, just as his Christology (with its ‘‘Reformed kenosis’’) collapses the humanity into the divinity of Christ’.

I have neither the time nor the desire to engage with Cassidy here, at least at this stage, but simply wanted to draw attention to the article.

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One thought on “Cassidy on McCormack on Barth: Election and Trinity”

How does Mccormack respond to such charges? I was wondering the same thing myself when reading through a couple of his articles. How do you keep the Creator creature distinction if the essence of God is in the incarnation?

Also, this is more of a random question (but I’m in the process of writing a paper where I’m going to interact a lot with Barth and Mccormack-and then Jungel and Moltmann-arguing for a divine ontology grounded in christological actualism), what do you think of the social model of the trinity? ha ha, pretty open question i guess.

I’m getting into Barth and Mccormack on my own (no teachers to guide me), but I’m not a huge fan of their interpretation of the trinity (what do i know though). I’ve been influenced much by Moltmann’s concept of the trinity.